The Impact on Identity

From Personal to Political Questions of Identity

In previous chapters, we have seen how global changes are creating issues of excessive control and standardization, how individualistic consumerism accelerates the atomization of communities, and how a relativistic epistemology facilitates a fragmentation of community and identity, and yet may also generate attempts at an authoritarian communal compliance. We have also seen how, in some societies, unmediated global ideas can lead to dangerous instability and violence.

We not only live in a changing world: we need to change to survive in it, and individuals need to be helped within educational institutions to deal with this complex of forces by a continued stress on criticality and autonomy, balanced by the cultivation of individual responsibility ...